CorrenteIf you have "no place to go," come here!http://www.correntewire.com/atom.xml2015-03-03T18:25:59+00:00http://www.correntewire.com/spare_me_obama_s_lesser_evilism_next_to_bibi_s_obnoxiousness2015-03-02T12:37:06+00:002015-03-02T13:01:11+00:00Spare Me Obama’s Lesser Evilism Next To Bibi’s Obnoxiousness libbyliberal

You have a senior Ukrainian official [Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko] saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia.

The “we” in “we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights” in Arquette’s rousing feminist appeal for fair pay and equal rights ignores how white women as a group have historically been, and in many ways remain, deeply invested in systems of white privilege and white supremacy in the United States and the West.

In the United States, white women actively supported Jim and Jane Crow. There were also women’s and children’s auxiliaries of the Ku Klux Klan.

Solutions can't happen, Sanders said, until progressive Americans turn out en masse to participate in the political process. He lamented turnouts for the 2014 midterms, in which only 36 percent of registered voters went to polls.

http://www.correntewire.com/internet_censorship_will_bring_total_mental_darkness_to_us2015-02-17T18:48:37+00:002015-02-17T18:54:58+00:00Internet Censorship Will Bring Total Mental Darkness to USlibbyliberal

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Fred Reed in “Cometh the Censor” has some grave predictions about eventual and total internet censorship:

I see with no surprise that Washington is stepping up its campaign to censor the internet. It had to come, and will succeed. It will put paid forever to America’s flirtation with freedom.

The country was never really a democracy, meaning a polity in which final power rested with the people. The voters have always been too remote from the levers of power to have much influence.

http://www.correntewire.com/return_of_the_coin2015-02-13T04:10:15+00:002015-02-13T04:14:50+00:00Return of the Coin?letsgetitdone

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The last few weeks have seen at least two posts calling attention to the potential use of the platinum coin in America's political economy. The first to appear was Rob Urie's piece in Counterpunch provocatively titled: “The Trillion Dollar Catshit Coin” And the second was Mike Sandler's post in The Huffington Post called “Greece and the U.S. Senate: Economics for the 99%.

Let's begin looking at these with Sandler's effort. He reports on two challenges to austerity. The first is from Syriza's victory in Greece and its promise to Greek voters that it will end austerity. The second:

The austerity mindset faces a new foe in the U.S. Senate as well. The re-shuffle of the last U.S. election that put austerity-minded Republicans in power has ironically resulted in a new anti-austerity economist being hired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Senate Budget Committee -- Professor Stephanie Kelton of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Professor Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a very pro-stimulus economic approach. Her hiring represents the biggest step forward for MMT, since the PR coup of the Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin in 2013. At that time, Kelton reportedly created the #mintthecoin hashtag that was featured in columns by Paul Krugman and others.

Sanders' hiring of Kelton is a break from the more conciliatory "balanced budgeting" approach of some Democrats, such as former treasury secretaries with ties to Wall Street and fiscally-conservative "deficit hawks." Kelton and her MMT colleagues go beyond the traditional Keynesian stimulus of short-term deficit spending. They seek to unleash the power of monetary policy to circumvent the scarcity mindset imposed on government action, perhaps even bringing the Trillion Dollar Coin back into the discussion.

Of course, Sandler means to say fiscal policy in the above, since MMT economics greatly favors reliance on fiscal, rather than monetary policy, in spite of the “monetary” in its name. But apart from that, he projects that we may see the platinum coin come back into prominence soon.